The faces of children as young as 2 or 3 begging in the streets of her native Tirana, Albania, haunted Adela Kuci throughout her McDaniel education and ultimately moved the 2012 grad to start an organization to help them.

“I remember Samuela begging in the streets with her mother since she was 2 years old," Kuci writes in an email from Albania. "By the time she was 8 years old, all she knew was the streets and people’s judgmental eyes staring at her.”

Kuci majored in Political Science and International Studies with a specialization in comparative governments and global studies first at McDaniel’s branch campus in Budapest and then, during her senior year at main campus in Westminster, Md.

Six students and two professors with widely diverse scholarship and interests won a prestigious, $45,000 ASIANetwork grant to research ownership and entrepreneurship in the tiehua industry in China.

The group, led by Professors Qin Fang and Kevin McIntyre, from the departments of History and Economics respectively, will spend nearly a month this summer doing research in Wuhu, a city teeming with more than 2 million people. A three-hour drive from Shanghai, Wuhu is the center of the tiehua art form but only a few hundred artists remain. The team will look at the impact on the industry with the market shift from state-owned monopoly to state capitalism. MORE »